Teach Yourself Audio Using the Right Records

Please Consider Taking Our Advice on How to Make More Progress in Audio

If you believe what you read on the various internet sites where audiophiles gather to dispense advice about everything they think they know regarding music, recordings and equipment, you are asking for trouble and you are surely going to get it.

You will encounter an endless supply of half-truths, untruths and just plain nonsense, more often than not defended tooth and nail by those with typing skills but not much enthusiasm for the tedium of tweaking and critical listening. 

What kind of equipment are these people using? How deep is their experience in audio?

Truth be told, I was pretty misguided myself during the first twenty (or thirty, gulp) years I spent in audio, reading the magazines (I still have my Stereophiles and Absolute Sounds from the 70s in boxes), traipsing from one stereo showroom to another, trying to figure out what constituted “good sound” so that I could manage to get my own equipment to produce something closer to the best of what I was hearing.

Most of the time what I heard made me want to go in a completely different direction. Which is often what I ending up doing when the solutions offered by the experts turned out to fall far short of what I considered acceptable.

Teach Yourself

So how do you learn about all this stuff?

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Letter of the Week – “Owning three other pressings of each LP, all I can say is WOW!”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classic Rock Albums Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased. As you can judge from the prices quoted below, this was many, many years ago. 

Hey Tom, 

After two or so years, I finally tried my first hot stampers. A Space In Time, a top ten stranded-on-a-desert-island album, and Quadrophenia (my favorite Who album).

Owning three other pressings of each LP, all I can say is WOW !!! The copies I purchased from Better Records live up to your company’s name, especially side two of a Space In Time. At $60.00 and $75.00 respectively, I got quite a bargain. [This is a very old letter!]

I can only imagine what some of the very best copies must sound like.

The joy and pleasure great music that sounds great can bring is priceless. After bill paying this weekend I can only hope that the Blood On The Tracks hot stamper is still there. With the Talisman I just ordered, I have to believe my listening experiences are only going to keep getting better!

Bob N.

Bob, thanks for your letter.

We love it when our customers take the time and make the effort to do their own shootouts, especially when we win, which is what happens about 99% of the time.

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Rockin’ Out to Simple Dreams

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Linda Ronstadt Available Now

Clearly this is one of Linda’s best albums, and I would have to say, based on my fairly extensive experience with her recorded output, that it is in fact THE BEST SOUNDING record she ever made.

I love Heart Like a Wheel, but it sure doesn’t sound like this, not even on the Triple Plus copies that win our shootouts. (Roughly 150 other listings for the Best Recording by an Artist or Group can be found here.)

I confess to having never taken the album seriously, dismissing it as a commercial collection of pop hits with about as much depth as the L.A. River — but I was wrong wrong WRONG.

This is a great sounding album on the right pressing, not the compressed piece of grainy cardboard we’ve all been playing for years, unaware of the tremendous sound quality lurking in the grooves of other copies, the ones that were blessed with the right stampers, the right vinyl and a healthy amount of fairy dust wafting over the press that day.

That’s what Hot Stamper shootouts are all about — finding those copies, the ones no one knows exist.

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This Tsar Saltan Is Diffuse, Washed Out, Veiled, and Vague

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov Available Now

Sonic Grade: C (at most)

Year ago we cracked open the Speakers Corner pressing of The Tale of Tsar Saltan in order to see how it would fare in a head to head comparison with a pair of wonderful sounding Londons we were in the process of shooting out at the time. Here are the differences we heard.

The soundstage, rarely much of a concern to us at here at Better Records but nevertheless instructive in this case, shrinks roughly 25% with the new pressing. Depth and ambience are reduced by about the same amount.

But what really bothered me was this:

The sound was just so vague.

There was a cloud of musical instruments, some here, some there, but they were very hard to SEE. On the Londons we played they were clear. You could point to each and every one. On this pressing that kind of pinpoint imaging was simply nowhere to be found. (Here are some other records that are good for testing vague imaging.)

Case in point: the snare drum, which on this recording is located toward the back of the stage, roughly halfway between dead center and the far left of the hall. As soon as I heard it on the reissue I recognized how blurry and smeary it was relative to the clarity and immediacy it had on the earlier London pressings we’d played. I’m not sure how else to describe it — diffuse, washed out, veiled — just vague.

(Here are some other records that are good for testing the sound of the snare drum.)

This particular Heavy Vinyl reissue is more or less tonally correct, which is not something you can say about many reissues these days. In that respect it’s tolerable and even enjoyable. I guess for thirty bucks it’s not a bad deal.

But… when I hear this kind of sound only one word comes to mind, a terrible word, a word that makes us recoil in shock and horror. That word is DUB. This reissue is made from copy tapes, not masters.

Copies in analog or copies in digital, who is to say, but it sure ain’t the master tape we’re hearing, of that we can be fairly certain. How else to explain such mediocre sound?

Yes, the cutting systems being used nowadays to master these vintage recordings aren’t very good; that seems safe to say.

Are the tapes too old and worn?

Is the vinyl of today simply not capable of storing the kind of magical sound we find so often in pressings from the 50s, 60s and 70s?

Could the real master tape not be found, and a safety copy used to master the album instead?

To all these questions and more we have but one answer: we don’t know.

We know we don’t like the sound of very many of these modern reissues and I guess that’s probably all that we need to know about them. If someone ever figures out how to make a good sounding modern reissue, we’ll ask them how they did it. Until then it seems the question is moot. (Someone did, which proves it can be done!)

Back in 2011 we stopped carrying Heavy Vinyl and most other audiophile LPs of all kinds. (These we like.)

So many of them don’t even sound this good, and this kind of sound bores us to tears.

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The Eagles / The Long Run

More of the Music of The Eagles

  • With INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on both sides, this copy has a rockin’ “Long Run” like you have never heard
  • The sonics are full, rich and vibrant with impressive punch down low and nice extension up top
  • The best songs prove that the Eagles were still at the height of their powers, at least some of the time…
  • The first two songs on both sides are practically as good as it gets for mainstream rock from this era – they’re playlist staples of Classic Rock stations from coast to coast to this day
  • The last song on side two, “The Sad Cafe,” is also a standout. Others, as they used to say in school, ‘need improvement.’
  • But five Killer Eagles songs is nothing to sneeze at. This is an album that belongs in most rock and pop collections, even if you choose to only listen to the best material on it.
  • “The Long Run is a chilling and altogether brilliant evocation of Hollywood’s nightly Witching Hour, that nocturnal feeding frenzy first detailed by Warren Zevon on his haunting Asylum debut (Warren Zevon, 1976) and the equally powerful Excitable Boy.” – Rolling Stone

The True Test For Side One

Want to know if you have a good side one on your copy? Here’s an easy test. Timothy B. Schmit’s vocal on “I Can’t Tell You Why” rarely sounds right. Most of the time he’s muffled, pretty far back in the soundstage, and the booth he’s in has practically no ambience. On the good copies, he’s not exactly jumping out of the speakers, but he’s clear, focused, and his voice is breathy and full of emotional subtleties that make the song the heartbreaking powerhouse it is.

This is why you need a Hot Stamper. Most copies don’t let you feel the song. Not like this one does. And the rest of the band is cookin’ here as well. From the big, full-bodied bass to the fat, punchy snare, this side is doing pretty much everything we want it to.

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Billy Joel – An Innocent Man

More of the Music of Billy Joel

  • This copy was doing everything right, with both sides earning KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades
  • Dynamic and open, with driving rhythmic energy – this early pressing brings this great batch of songs to life
  • Jam packed with hits: “An Innocent Man,” “The Longest Time,” “Tell Her About It,” “Uptown Girl,” “Leave a Tender Moment Alone,” and more – seven singles in all
  • “An Innocent Man remained on the U.S. Pop album chart for 111 weeks, becoming Joel’s longest charting studio album behind The Stranger.”
  • 4 stars: “…he’s effortlessly spinning out infectious, memorable melodies in a variety of styles, from the Four Seasons send-up ‘Uptown Girl’ and the soulful ‘Tell Her About It’ to a pair of doo wop tributes, ‘The Longest Time’ and ‘Careless Talk.’ Joel has rarely sounded so carefree either in performance or writing, possibly due to ‘Christie Lee’ Brinkley, a supermodel who became his new love prior to An Innocent Man.”

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Small Speakers and Some Audio Lessons I’ve Learned Over the Last 50+ Years

These Are the Fundamentals of Good Sound

UPDATE 2026

The video linked to below is now private.

However, as you will see from our commentary, it really doesn’t make much of a difference whether it is or not. What we had to say about it years ago is nonetheless true.

Do not believe a word you hear in this video. [Not a problem!]

You probably shouldn’t even watch it. [Same.]

Let me state clearly one of our core beliefs here at Better Records.

Small speakers are incapable of lifelike musical reproduction in the home.

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Flack / Hathaway – Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway

More of the Music of Roberta Flack

  • Boasting two STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides or close to them, we guarantee you’ve never heard Roberta and Donny’s 1972 collaboration sound remotely as good as it does on this vintage copy
  • There’s Tubey Magic, sweetness and spaciousness all over this recording
  • One of our favorite duet albums, Flack and the woefully underrated Soul Man Donny Hathaway are in top form here
  • Problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • 4 stars: “A duet classic, and perhaps the most popular album Roberta Flack made. ‘Where Is the Love’ dominated urban contemporary radio for almost the entire year, while ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ was just as influential…”

These soulful duets sound wonderful. The best sides are big, bold, open and transparent with a huge three-dimensional soundfield, strong presence, good rhythmic energy, and wonderfully dynamic leads and choruses. (more…)

Ted Heath – Swings In High Stereo

More Large Group Jazz

  • Superb sound throughout, with both sides earning solid Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER
  • Impossibly quiet vinyl for a vintage London Stereo pressing from 1958 – how this one survived for so many years in such lovely playing condition is something we will never know
  • Kingsway Hall, Wilkinson and the Decca Tree add up to audiophile quality Big Band sound, on this copy anyway
  • Heath and his group play with all the energy and verve essential to this joyful Big Band music – he really does swing in high stereo
  • We consider Ted Heath’s early London recordings to be some of the best big band ever recorded

This album has Demo Disc sound like you will not believe. Just listen to Heath’s arrangement of “Big Ben,” the second track on side two, for audiophile quality Big Band sound the likes of which you may have never heard.

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Listen for the Room Around this Drum Kit

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Barney Kessel Available Now

We highly recommend you make every effort to find yourself a copy of this album and use it to test your system. The right pressing can be both a great Demo Disc and a great Test Disc.

The best Hot Stamper early pressings have the Tubey Magic we’ve come to expect from Contemporary circa 1958, with that warm, rich, full-bodied sound that RVG often struggles to get on tape. (But when he’s good he too is hard to beat.)

However, some pressings in our shootout managed to give us an extra level of transparency and ambience that most of the original pressings we played could not.

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